I know Jorge! That work is quite amazing. They are working based on shadows. They measure the shadows of lampposts changing in small fractions of time, their size and angle, and do the same from very different places in Russia. The result is amazing!

I saw "Apollo" and thought US Space debris...and considered hiding under my desk as World War III ensues. (There was one Russian minister that declared that the meteorite was not from space but part of a U.S. weapons test).

They need better intel. Everyone in the US knows our military industrial complex isn't about working weapons...it's about milking tax dollars in going far beyond budgets to improve SEC filings. Can anyone in the US name 5 successful weapons programs to go into production over the last 10 years without major problems?

But they cheated and jumped ahead. Herschel was discovered in 1960 (and possibly 1934). 1999 Hirayama and 2001 Einstein were discovered February/March 1973. They do that a lot, for example, Quaoar (big TNO) was given 50000 even though 49,999 and 50001 were discovered two years earlier.

(I was wrong about naming as well, asteroid candidates are also given a year-code designation, switching to sequential (-ish) numbering when their orbits are locked down. 1866 Sisyphus' was initially 1972 XA. Not

There are only 2 types of Earth crossing asteroids: Apollos with a semi major axis larger than 1AU and perihelion smaller than Earth's aphelion and Atens with a semi major axis smaller than 1AU and aphelion larger than Earth's perihelion. There are 4803 known Apollo asteroids (I don't know where the 5200 number in the summary comes from but IAU's Minor Planet Center [minorplanetcenter.net] knows of only 4803) and 747 known Atens, so there was a very good chance that the meteorite was an Apollo...

Yay, what a surprise: "likely an Apollo"...[sarcasm] gosh, that is unexpected! [/sarcasm]

Given that the vast majority of objects in earth-crossing orbits are Apollos, that is hardly a surprising conclusion. It would have been much more interesting if it was an Aten - much less of those around. Or a comet fragment

87% of asteroids in earth-crossing orbits are Apollos. 13% are Atens. Then there is a n unknown quantity of cometary objects

So, if there 80 million of these Apollo Asteroids, and 500 known, there's 160,000 unknown asteroids for every known one. I'd presume that there's recording of prior observations of the Apollo Asteroids, and it would be interesting to discover whether this asteroid has been observed in the past. We hear all this publicity about near-hits (near-miss is a term that makes no sense) that have been tracked, but this was a hit that wasn't tracked. This high ratio of unknown Apollo asteroids suggests that reliably